The Exchange: Donovan Hohn on “Moby-Duck”

In “Moby-Duck,” Donovan Hohn, a former English teacher and the current features editor at GQ, goes in search of twenty-eight thousand bath toys that washed out of a cargo ship into the Pacific in 1992. In the company of zealous beachcombers, intrepid oceanographers, and eccentric ship captains, Hohn ventures to the Chinese plastics factory where the toys were born and onward around the globe to Alaska and the Arctic. “Moby-Dick,” one of Hohn’s favorite books, guides his quest—though he’s searching for a speck of yellow, not a white whale, the journey he makes is no less incredible, turning, as he writes, “a map into a world.”

Earlier this week, Hohn and I exchanged e-mails. An edited version of our conversation appears below:

When did you first learn of the strange case of the missing bath toys, and why did you want to go in search of them?

I learned of them late one night in February 2005 while grading papers by students in a twelfth-grade literary journalism course I was teaching. In 2003, predictions that the toys would soon make landfall on the coast of New England after eleven years adrift had provoked a flurry of news items, one of which a student of mine had stumbled on. He gave a brief synopsis of the story of the bath toys lost at sea, a synopsis that I would only later learn mixed both fancy and fact.

While the title suggests a frenzied hunt for these bath toys lost at sea, your narrative probes deeper, reflecting on themes such as childhood, adventure, and wilderness. When did you realize that the story went beyond the chase? And what about the story was compelling enough for you to quit your job, bid a temporary farewell to your family, and sail tempestuous seas?

I’m an essayist first, a journalist second. I can’t help playing meditative variations on themes. But those meditations also reflect the influence of Melville’s Ishmael. Once I chose the title, I was almost obliged to go swimming in libraries as well as go sailing on oceans—obliged to contemplate the Yellowness of the Duck. It began as a kind of joke, but I soon began to take the joke seriously. The Yellowness of the Duck turns out to be both more meaningful and mysterious than you’d think, especially in contrast to the ocean, that sublime wilderness of water that was to Melville divine. Then, too, shortly after I set out I became a father. Childhood was much on my mind. As for quitting the job, well, there’s witchcraft in a map and a chase once begun is difficult to abandon. The book deal also helped.

I love that book. It’s one of those books that can cast a spell, and under its spell, you can read it many times and each time feel as if you’re reading it anew. Of the many guides who accompanied me on my journey Melville was perhaps the most important. I’d never pretend to compete with him—talk about anxiety of influence—but I did try to learn from him, and in a way converse with him. I think the thing I tried most to emulate was the way Melville plays with dynamics, in his sentence rhythms, those storms and calms of prose, but also in the modulations of tone and mode. In “Moby-Dick,” a scene of slapstick comedy will gave way to tragedy or darkly satirical irony or to meditation and then to heart-racing action.

Your book is so illustrative and gripping partly because you are a character in it. Rather than report at a distance, you perform grueling crew duties to earn your keep. How did your involvement, strenuous at times, affect your writing? As an embedded journalist of sorts, what were some of the challenges you faced?

I kind of had to write myself in. Without me as a character, my serial adventures would have felt too episodic. The risk of the first-person for a journalist is that you will seem or in fact be narcissistic. But there are risks to maintaining a detached third-person, too. Here again Ishmael was a guide. Although he’s an actor in the story, an oarsman in his whale boat, his main job is that of a narrator and interpreter of events. On each of my journeys I tried hard to cede center stage to one or more of the characters I met, and I had the good fortune to meet a number of fascinating characters engaged in dramatic undertakings or investigating oceanic mysteries.

Throughout the book you refer to your first son, who was born shortly after you started this odyssey. At one point, you write, “I’ve entirely failed to reconcile fatherhood with adventuring.” How were you able to resolve this inner conflict? And what have you learned about being a father?

Fatherhood and adventuring are difficult to reconcile, which is why I’ve given up adventuring—at least until my two sons are a little older. One of my favorite of the books I discovered while swimming through libraries is Rockwell Kent’s “Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure,” about the six months Kent spent living on Fox Island in Alaska’s maritime wilderness. A serial philanderer and deserter and a bit bipolar, Kent was no model father. But he brought his nine-year-old son with him to Fox Island, and his son grew up to become a biologist, and decades later looked back on those six months in the wilderness as the best six months of his childhood. There’s a scene in “Wilderness” that I mention in the book. Rowing across Resurrection Bay in a storm, showing “a little panic,” the boy says to his father, “I want to be a sailor so I’ll learn not to be afraid.” If only in a rowboat on the pond in Central Park, this is something I’ve tried to teach my elder son, how “not to be afraid.” That, and how to be curious. I think I’ve had some success. He once told me that he’d like to be a scientist so that he can go to Antarctica and bring back treasures he finds there.

Colorful characters and stunning descriptions propel your book, but chemistry and oceanography ground it. Did you have a prior background in science? How did you preserve the narrative while including the necessary facts?

Growing up by San Francisco Bay, I used to dream of becoming a marine biologist. I even attended an oceanographic summer camp (on a Coast Guard boat we got to study the opacity of the water beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, something I still remember, and we did a joyous amount of exploring in the littoral zone). That dream ended in a high school chemistry class. I wasn’t very good at balancing chemical equations, but I was pretty good at writing about science. I loved it when my teachers included an essay question on a science test. But the science in the book required a painstaking and at times brain-hurting education—hours reading textbooks and papers, but also listening to some admirably patient teachers. One of the great things about traveling aboard research vessels is that you can spend the long days under steam pestering scientists with questions.

On tedious days at sea, you mention reading Fridtjof Nansen’s “Farthest North” and Barry Lopez’s “Arctic Dreams.” What are some of the best books to read while at sea?

I’d better limit it to what you could stuff in your carpet bag or your ergonomic backpack. “Moby-Dick,” of course. Conrad’s “Typhoon” and “The Mirror of the Sea.” H.M. Tomlinson’s “The Sea and the Jungle.” Rachel Carson’s “The Sea Around Us” (some of the science is out of date but not most of it and the descriptive prose is as wonderful as a tide pool). Peter Matthiessen’s “Blue Meridian.” A decent undergraduate oceanography textbook, such as “Essentials of Oceanography.” Jonathan Raban’s anthology “The Oxford Book of the Sea.” And lastly, a recent one, published after I finished my own seafaring, Philip Hoare’s “The Whale.”

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